Sunday, 26 August 2012

A Tent Situation

For the first time since June, I'm off on camp tomorrow, and I'm super-excited. As we all know, it's one of my greatest fantasies to have sex in a tent.

Except it isn't.

I'll readily admit that the idea of having sex in a tent appeals to me, but it's not really a situation I construct and masturbate over. It's not something I imagine myself doing (although other people... well, that's different), and it's certainly not something I'd go to camp to do. I mean, I wouldn't go to camp with an SO specifically to have sex in a tent. I mean, my current girlfriend wouldn't do well at camp, really. I love it, but I'm not sure someone with OCD would.

The reason for this is that from the ages of 16 to 21 I regularly went to Woodcraft camps which only featured people from the ages of 16 to 21. This group of people - known colloquially as DFs - got up to all sorts of things. Okay, so we weren't wild and destructive - far from it, it's Woodcraft, not the Scouts or any Brigades, we love the environment around us - and although there were a few class-As around, they were quickly stamped out. But there was rather a lot of sex.

It's not a massive surprise. A load of people from an organisation that promotes freedom of expression and the empowerment of young people, aged 16 to 21 with nobody older in a field for a week? What do you think we were doing, swapping knitting patterns? Fortunately for us, neither pregnancy or STIs were a problem at DF camps, because we had some amazing sexual health workshops which raised both awareness of sexual safety and pleasure in a very accessible way, plus free condoms (one of which I eventually used, years later - although it was still in date!). We had a Rainbow network to support LGBT people - not that they needed a network, there was no danger of discrimination here and at one point we axed it for being pointless. Sex was a fun activity and we openly saw it as such. I mean, camp - it wasn't an orgy or a sex party - we weren't totally uninhibited (the furthest I got was a snog from a girl I had a crush on, but nevertheless!). But there was a lot of sex going on - more at some camps than others.

I collected a lot of memories from DF camps. I remember shining a light on a tent so we could see two shadows moving in a very distinctive way; I remember walking into a room (on one of our residential camps) to find one of my friends hanging onto a pipe to stop himself from falling onto the floor with laughter upon finding two of our number having sex in a sleeping bag. I remember the statement, "I have lube! Strawberry flavour!". I remember the phrase, "I need to have sex. Any volunteers?". I remember our sexual workshop where I had "whipped cream" on my head and had to guess what it was (I got it, but I feel sorry for the guy who had "erogenous zones"). I remember something called the "DF Dirty Diagram" - the visual representation of a theory that everyone in DFs was linked by a trail of hypothetical saliva, and that everyone had kissed everyone by extension (I used the same theory to draw a web of everyone in another community I was in at the time, and that worked).

And I remember the game of "I Have Never" in which the subject of having had sex in a tent came up.

I like the idea of having sex in a little tent, maybe one of those orange Vangos that's designed for two, but can actually sleep fourteen. Especially in the rain. But it's not something I'd plan. My time in DFs implanted the whole sex-in-a-tent idea in me. It needed to be unplanned, spontaneous. It needed to be someone else coming into your tent. It needed to be a naughty liaison under canvas, maybe with the rest of the camp oblivious while the fire crackled away in the background. Rain makes sex more romantic, but it wouldn't be necessary. So while playing "I Have Never," and thereby separating the wheat from the chaff, I did feel a twinge of jealousy for the blonde pretty one who got to drink.

However.

Having said that, it's not a necessity. It's hardly even a dream that may not ever come true. It's not really something I want to do. I've passed the DF stage where sex under canvas was wild, free, and pretty much expected from certain people - and it's certainly not going to happen at any of our group's camps (our district were unnaturally prudish, with me being the only one who ever went on DF camps, and we all know each other too much to assume that anything even close to sex would happen). It's not a fantasy I have, and it's certainly not something I'm obsessed with at any rate. But I still think it's a nice situation to cheekily drop into conversation at some point.

1 comment:

I have always had a fantasy about having sex in a tent, but I think really the fantasy about going camping with a partner is more important. Maybe something about going back to nature, about escaping the real world, about surviving in a tiny capsule that's temporarily all yours. It's strangely enticing.